Even her cats allowed her this time to herself. Assholes they might have been, but they also recognized and respected this aspect of who Nora was. She could sense them now, Red and Hyde hunkered down on her bed close enough to touch, Kelso alone in the small kitchen, flat against the base of the oven, purring softly against the night. They understood that when Indigo was in the apartment, it was safest for them to stay low, quiet, and unseen. The primeval part of them allowed this. Their instinct for self-preservation insisted upon it.
She often talked to them about who she was and what she could do. They were surrogate friends, listening but not understanding, accepting her heartfelt monologues without passing judgment or questioning the choices she had made, the actions she had taken.
Just over a year before, she had returned to her apartment splashed with someone else’s blood. It had been her second encounter with members of the Children of Phonos—who also called themselves Phonoi. From what she’d gleaned, they were a worldwide black-magic cult with a number of chapters in the United States. Her first run-in with them had involved the theft of an occult artifact from the New-York Historical Society. Simple enough. But that second time had included the kidnapping of the husband of a high-powered corporate attorney, some kind of blackmail scheme. Indigo had never discovered exactly what the scheme had been, because although she’d brought the husband home alive, they’d arrived to find his wife dead, her Phonoi assassins waiting for them.
Indigo had killed three of them that night. The story the dead attorney’s husband had given the media had fueled the legend of the city’s nocturnal vigilante, but all it had taught Indigo was that the Children of Phonos weren’t just socialite fucks dabbling in magic—some of them were vicious, highly skilled killers. She’d kept her eyes open for them ever since.
That night, covered in their blood, she had emerged from the shadows inside her apartment and gone immediately to scrub her sins clean in the shower. Kelso, ever the loner, had come to sit on her lowered toilet-seat lid and listen to her confession.
“There were three of them.” Nora’s eyes were closed as scorching water cleansed her face. “They bore the mark behind their right ears, and the abdominal branding. I’ve been tracking them for a while, you know that, I’ve told you all about it. What they did to that woman—the lawyer—it was so brutal I couldn’t let them get away with it. I just…”
As Indigo she had opened her eyes and stared at Kelso, and the cat had hissed and darted from the small bathroom. She’d reached across the sink and swiped her hand across the misted mirror. Shadows were leaking from her pupils and running down her face, like eyeliner melting in the heat.
“I slit their throats,” she’d said to herself in the mirror, unsure who was talking to whom. She could practically still feel the shadow knife in her hand. “It was the right thing to do.”
She had believed that then, and she believed it now. She did.
Nora had been careful not to be the one reporting the story of the murdered attorney and the wild story her husband told about Indigo. That had been Sam Loh’s last job before he’d left the newspaper. She’d tried not to take pleasure in the reaction to her deeds. “Indigo,” some people had said, “Indigo gave those killers what they deserved.”
If she felt a swelling of pride or satisfaction, she tamped it down quickly. Murder was nothing to celebrate, no matter how deserving the victims. In the long, lonely evenings she spent in the apartment with only her cats for company, talking to them was an effort to alleviate her guilt, or perhaps to lessen its impact. But she held on to the memories of her violence, of her victims’ blood gushing over her hands, the light dying in their eyes as her shadows danced around her in glee. She was Indigo and Indigo was her, but Nora refused to allow murder to feel ordinary.
Because sometimes the shadows were malevolent. Sometimes Indigo thought they hid something deeper and darker. She had always been able to control this malevolence, drive it down with her own will and lock it away in the deeper, more complete darkness from which it seemed to originate, a place marked not only by an absence of light but by some heavier presence, an anti-place where darkness was the norm. But a few times lately she’d felt this separate presence rising, rebelling against her efforts to contain it.
Four times, in fact.
Now that she had examined the fourth dead child and realized that the Phonoi were responsible for these murders, she could place the occasions of these shadowy incursions approximately alongside the murders.
That frightened her and made her think of long ago. Her memories of that time were like a movie viewed over and over, spooling through her mind while she watched as an outside observer. They were painful times to dwell upon, but she had to understand them—because the power that had made her might also have brought into being that presence in the shadows, reveling in murder, preparing to attack.
The man at her parents’ funeral is short and thin, of an indefinable age, and with a face she has never before seen—but that shouldn’t matter. Plenty of strangers are here, people her parents encountered during their working lives, but whom they never mentioned. She’s never met them. It’s nice that they have come to pay their respects. Hundreds have done so, and now Nora stands in the midst of a large group of black-clad people, a vast slick of shadows in the blazing sunlight of this fine summer day. They stand on the grass and paths; they rest against other gravestones, lean on each other for support.
Nora has no one to lean on. She is almost at the center of this crowd, but only almost, because its true center, its focus, is the two rectangular holes in the world. Everything she knows and loves has been lowered into those holes. At nineteen years old, a gunman’s random bullets have stolen away her family and security and left her floundering in a world she does not understand.
Dust to dust, the dull thump of soil, of wood, hugs and kissed cheeks and hands held tight, and then Nora is being led back across the cemetery by an uncle she doesn’t remember meeting before. He’s sad and stern, but he doesn’t pretend to be in true mourning for his estranged brother. She respects his honesty.
“There’s a sizable sum in insurance money coming to you,” he says. “I’ll stay in the city for a few days and help you through the process. Matt would have wanted that.”
Matt would have wanted to not be dead, Nora thinks.
The tears come again as she thinks of her father down there in that hole in the world, eight feet from her mother but an eternity away.
As they reach the parking lot and her uncle Theo guides her toward his Mercedes, the short, thin man is waiting beneath a tree. The smoke from his cigarette curls up in the still air, and it looks as if it comes from the barrel of a gun. Uncle Theo is opening the car door, and as Nora crunches across the gravel toward the tree, he calls after her. She ignores him.
The man smiles as she approaches. He leans back against the tree, taking a long drag on his cigarette. Its end crackles and glows.